Menu

Recent Posts

Archives

Category: News

“Use a superior development system than your target to develop your game.”– John Romero, Early Id Software Programming Principles

One of the nice things about being employed again was the ability to afford a new computer, something I’ve put off as long as I could.

About 5 years ago, I’d purchased a very high-end mobile workstation to take with me overseas so I’d have something to keep myself entertained on the 26+ hour flights to and from the US:

Intel Core i7 3630QM @3.2GHz

32GB of DDR3 RAM @ 1600MHz

Nvidia GTX 675MX 4GB of VRAM

120GB SSD Primary Drive

1TB Storage Drive

When I came back home, I found it more convenient to develop on my aging desktop machine with ideas of upgrading it when possible:

Intel Core i7 2600K @ 3.4GHz

8GB DDR3 @ 1600MHz

AMD HD 5770s 2GB VRAM (x2 in Crossfire)

120 GB SSD Primary Drive

80GB SSD Auxiliary Drive

320GB Storage Drive

1 TB Secondary Storage Drive

A couple of months ago, I built myself a new PC that should last me a good 3-4+ years with minor upgrades:

Intel Core i7 7700K @ 4.2 GHz

16GB DDR4 @ 3200MHz

Nvidia GTX 1080 8GB of VRAM

240GB SSD Primary Drive

2TB Storage Drive

I’ve been very pleased with it so far, and have been slowly reinstalling my development tools. The next step was to copy down my data so that I could pick up where I left off. To facility this, I purchased an inexpensive but well-made USB 3.0 SATA Hard Drive Docking Station.

What was intended to be a simple task, however, turned out to be anything but…The data I needed was spread across 4 different drives, one of which was BitLocker encrypted. The machine itself belonged to me originally, was lent a friend who in-turn savaged it, replacing several of the drives and the OS. On the actual computer, I’d solved this using Windows Libraries, but didn’t have that luxury when reading the raw drives.

So what did I do? I incorporated a handy application called SpaceSniffer to help me work out [visually] where the files I was looking for were.

This application is very similar to WinDirStat, but performs significantly faster. I still have a few more applications to [re]install, but I can get that done tomorrow at some point as it is now 4:13am, and I should think about getting to bed as I have to be up in 3 hours.

It’s been over 6 months since my last post. I’ve settled into my new role, and as the year winds to a close, I’ve been getting the itch to return to game making. Unfortunately, circumstances are such that I’ll be going it alone as Eric has retired from V-Toad Games.

Game programming and design is difficult, frustrating and greatly rewarding… but it’s not for everyone. What I learned from last go at it was that programming is not painting by the numbers. Being able to complete an exercise no more makes you a programmer than following a recipe makes you a cordon bleu chef. There are core skills you have to master, and to do that, you have to be passionate enough to stick with it.

Eric really tried – I sincerely believe that. Nevertheless, I know all too well that bills must be paid, and can’t blame him for not having the energy to go home and learn something that he just wan’t passionate about.

So why is being a solo project a problem for me? Many game developers, past and present, were/are one-man shows. I suppose it’s because I like feedback; I like to share what I’ve learned and bounce ideas off of other people because this helps me to reinforce and retain that knowledge.

As a consequence of my hiatus, I’ve all but lost everything I learned about GML, and will need to go through the lessons again to get back in the saddle. This time around should be much quicker, albeit lonelier.

You Need Enough Pizza and Diet Coke…

It’s been about three and half weeks since my last update, so I wanted to take a moment and talk about where I am, and where I’d like to be.

As with anything, development is tied to real-world constraints. While it is true that some barriers are self-imposed, others are bound to either personal limitations (your own capacity to learn and develop new skills) or external limitations, mostly financial in nature.

John Carmack once said, “In the information age, the barriers [to entry into programming] just aren’t there. The barriers are self imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”

The sentiment is noble enough; I concede that you don’t need millions of dollars to make something great, just the will the see it through – even if that means sleeping on the floor or wading across rivers…but that isn’t the whole truth, is it?

Who pays for the floor you sleep on? Where do you get the money for your pizza and diet coke? Who pays for the electricity to power your cheap PC? Suppose something breaks – who pays for the replacement?

…and where do you get the cheap PC anyway? Not everyone is morally ambiguous enough to abscond with their employer’s computers to a rented lake house, away from prying eyes to work on their own projects in secret. Lakes flood, and when they do, you may find yourself wading through deep water indeed (and a lawsuit if you aren’t careful).

There is no honor among thieves. That fact is self-evident, but if you aren’t convinced, consider this: half of Id Software’s founding members were fired or forced to resign within the span of 5 years… but that’s all ancient history now.

…I would venture to say that the outlook of a teenager with no student debt or mortgage is very different. It’s a lot easier to just pack and move when all of your belongings fit into the boot of a brown MGB (which is to say, not much).

Then again, I never did like Diet Coke.

Paging Mr. Finagle Sod-Murphy…

About 2.5 weeks ago, we had a severe thunderstorm, losing power for a short while as well as about 4 hours of unsaved work. A few days later, I heard a loud pop near my feet, followed by the smell of burning plastic.

I quickly disconnected the power strip and the issue became immediately clear – the power cable connecting to my PC was to warm to the touch, and 4″ segment in the middle (presumably a short) was fused into a straight, blackened, stiff and brittle mass. This was probably the cheapest (and easiest to replace) component – it could have been the power supply, or worse yet, the motherboard!

A few days later, my dish washer stopped draining and needed to be repaired – I did so and threw out my back in the process – standing and sitting were difficult and painful for about a week or so.

Not long after that, my wife’s vehicle began stalling after she took it in to get the oil changed. I took it in the following day, and stuck around to talk to the shop owners as I had been coming there for about 12 years and had a good relationship with them. He asked about my work situation, and offered to refer me to a guy he knew at a large, local IT provider – more on that later…

…We Gotsta Get Paid!

Last month, over the course of a day or so, I made a small game for a friend. I wanted to explore making a game from start to finish just for the practice of it. It was just the right mixture of cheese, fun and juvenile humor to potentially make it a YouTube Let’s Play sensation.

The game had a start screen, a non-numerical score and a game over screen. I figured, if I could add a few more levels, enemies and secrets, I might be able to sell it for $0.99 on GameJolt. I have a list of hundreds of YouTube Let’s Players I could give a free copy to with the request that they make a video for it. The press might be sufficient to get enough people to buy a copy to keep me a float for another 3-6 months while I work on Beaster’s Dungeon.

While I managed to overcome several programming issues, and add far more so sophisticated features than I initially expected to, what eventually sent my progress grinding to a halt was my own limitations as an artist – my imagination was well beyond my skill and this stifled me.

For the last 3.5 weeks, I’ve been about 10% from finishing the game to my satisfaction, a loss of time I simply could not afford to bare. With bills looming overheard, and my savings coming dangerously close to exhaustion, coupled with the few meaty bitch slaps from Mr. Murphy I described above, it became apparent to me that I can’t weather much more of this. I needed a plan B.

Quit Your Day Job…

In order to quit your day job, you have to have one to begin with…If I go on to finish that last 10% and publish my game and it fails commercially, I’d still have a job to fall back on and bills would continue to get paid.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the game might be a runaway hit, and I could use the money to put a substantial dent in my mortgage and/or student loans, bringing me one step closer to financial independence.

In either case, I couldn’t wait to see which way the pendulum swung as bills will not wait…

So I got in contact with the guy my car dealer referred me to, and within a week, I was on the phone with a recruiter. Following that call, I was invited to interview in person, which takes place next week. If successful, I could working full-time again as little as 2 weeks later. The pay is below average for the kind of work it is, the hours would be unusually long and there would be no overtime.

The last time I worked was almost a year ago, and so at this point, I’d rather take a step down in rank and pay to get back into a more technical role (the last two jobs I had leaned more toward general management). I could learn a lot, and potentially get a better job somewhere else.

This all a moot point unless I’m actually made an offer, which is not a foregone conclusion. Between now and my face-to-face, I’ve got to spend my time preparing for the interview and boning up on technologies I haven’t worked with in 5 years or more.

Busy != Productivity…*

This has been a busy, though not an especially fruitful week in terms of development progress. I got side tracked trying to learn a couple of new techniques I’d need (shaders and surfaces) and I’m continuing to troubleshoot code signing certificate issues…

For the prior, I just stumbled on the fix this afternoon while trying to make a pause function – more on that on a separate post when I have the time/motivation to write it.

On the later, much of what I have encountered keeps coming back to the certificate signing request (.CSR) and private key export (.PFX/.PVK). I’ve been using OpenSSL, which my provider doesn’t seem to support, instead preferring that I use Window’s certificate snap-in.

This would be fine if I were on a domain, but I’m not…Ergo, there’s no certificate enrollment policy as there is no domain controller or active directory service. I had a spare PC sitting around (my wife’s old gaming desktop which had since been replaced by a much nicer gaming laptop), so I decided to plug it in and see if it still ran.

When I did this, I was greeted with a long series of short beeps (power failure) followed by repeated attempts to start itself only to immediately shutdown again. After digging around in the garage, I found a craptastic 500W PSU to replace the relatively nice 700W OCZ Stealth Steam modular PSU that was in it…

This allowed it to boot, and a cursory look around the machine seemed to indicate that it was good working condition otherwise.

Next Steps

Once I get the “server” up and running, setup all the required services and so forth, I should be able to sort out the SSL issue… I feel as though I’m spending way too much time on this, but without it, I’m not only out $140 on something I can’t use, but I’m also unable to distribute “trustworthy” applications.

UPDATE 2/09/2017: After about a week of back and forth with YYG support, I was able to get the HTML5 module working. It turns out that GMS v1.4 had several bugs preventing most HTML5 games from running properly when using certain functions.

Eventually, I was instructed to download the “Early Access” build (v1.9.525) which resolved this issue. There were a few more code optimizations I needed to make, but the game-breaking bugs were gone.

The Good

With a helping hand from an old and dear friend of mine, I was finally able to make the some important steps forward. Some of you may notice that www.vtoadgames.com now supports SSL!

I’m also in the process of obtaining a Code Signing Certificate so that Windows Exports (.exe files) won’t display a Smartscreen warning that the publisher (yours truly) is unknown – I should have that today if everything is in order.

Additionally, I’ve also purchased GMS Professional and the HTML5 export module as I feel pretty comfortable with GML at this point.

The Bad

YoYo Games, creators of GameMaker Studio (GMS), have elected to go the way GameSalad and discontinue offering a free ‘standard’ edition of their product once GameMaker Studio 2 (currently in beta) is launched.

While those who already obtained a free Standard Edition license for 1.4x will get to keep it, no one else will be able to get one going forward. A similar thing happened with GameSalad, which went to a subscription model after discontinuing it’s free version.

Cui Bono?

Surely not YoYo Games…The reason GameMaker Studio was so appealing to many Students and Hobbyists was it’s accessibility – they said it themselves:

We want to make game creation accessible to everyone. We think that once people jump in and start creating a game, they’ll see firsthand how easy it is with GameMaker: Studio. – James Foreman, April 11, 2016. GameMaker Studio: Standard Goes Free FAQ

While most users would be content with the Standard version, some might decide they have a knack for it and take the plunge. The only thing that cutting out the free version does is bar entry for those who aren’t prepared to spend $150 to satisfy their curiosity. I know, I was one of them. Had I not had the opportunity to learn GML before buying the Professional Edition, I probably would not have.

With that said, if you still on the fence, pick up 1.4 Standard for free while you still can!

The Ugly

Please see the update above.

I purchased the HTML5 Export Module with the reasonable expectation that a program which performed flawlessly as a Windows target and compiled .EXE file would work fine when ported to HTML5. I was wrong…

Just about everything failed from the particle effects, collision events and everything in between, making the game unplayable. I submitted a ticket to YYG, but I’ll probably have to go back through the code and optimize it to get it to work. In any case, it was a good learning experience…